The United Kingdom has been taken over by Puritans. A Uruguayan footballer was forced to apologise for writing a tweet to a friend who had congratulated him on his goal scoring, “Gracias, Negrito.” Negrito is a term of affection in South America.
A year ago, I moved from London to Barcelona. Apart from giving up Twitter and the other antisocial networks, it is the best decision I have made in a long time.
You know: the weather, the sea, the food, the people. Another less obvious reason is being able to flee from the new puritanism that today suffocates Anglo-Saxon societies.
Edinson Cavani, who has just moved from France to England, will know what I am talking about. Cavani is a Uruguayan footballer who left Paris Saint Germain for Manchester United a couple of months ago. Last weekend he scored two goals for his new team and received loads of congratulations on Instagram. He responded to one of the messages, from a friend: “Gracias, Negrito”, plus an emoji with the image of a handshake.
They murdered him. “Racist!” Shouted the newspapers, the players and former players, turned television commentators. Sports journalists competed to see who was most scandalized to deliver sermons and to pressure the English federation (the Football Association) to suspend him for three games. The striker, Troy Deeney, the self-proclaimed Martin Luther King of Watford FC, declared that no, a three-game penalty would not be enough to compensate for “the pain” Cavani had caused.
The notion that Cavani wrote this with offensive or racist intent would not have crossed either of their minds. But “offensive and racist” was the verdict of England’s moral guardians, convinced of their cultural superiority over the barbarians of the South. Let’s see what happens if they find out that Mercedes Sosa sang a song called “Duerme (sleep) Negrito.” They will accuse “La Negra”, as she was affectionately known, of racism and will censor her song on the radio for fear of offending the fine sensibilities of the great English people.
The laugh is that, in trying to draw attention to their good natures, they reveal their arrogance, their own prejudices and their ignorance of the customs of those who had the misfortune to be born on the other side of the English Channel. Just this week, the British education minister, Gavin Williamson, declared, without irony, “We are a much better country than everyone else, right?” He said this because the United Kingdom was the first country in the West to approve the use of the Pfizer vaccine against Covid, but he seems to have thought that he was talking about a universal truth.
Williamson’s silliness comes from the Right, from the more extreme Brexit wing of the Conservative party. But to be fair to him, he represents the thinking of the great masses. Williamson is not from the sect that called for Cavani’s lynching.
The new Puritans come from the Left. Its inquisitors, who increasingly reduce the space of political correctness and punish those who deviate from their orthodoxies, consider themselves exemplary progressives. Not a day goes by in England without a fatwa being decreed against a university professor, a student, a journalist, a writer, or some 16th century figure whose ideas do not correspond to those in vogue in the second decade of the 21st.
A few weeks ago, the British Library placed one of the great poets of the last century, Ted Hughes, on a blacklist of characters who had supposedly benefited from slavery. Hughes’s sin: having an ancestor born in 1592 with ties to the colonization of North America. The purpose of the library, whose boss recently declared that “racism is the creation of white people,” was to impose de facto censorship on his writing. If Hughes were still alive, the Twitter troopers would have been mobilized to silence him or have him kicked out of his job.
Suzanne Moore, a veteran journalist for The Guardian, is still alive. A few weeks ago, Moore wrote that gender was a biological classification, “not a feeling.”
It caused an uproar.
A letter signed by 338 employees of The Guardian, England’s most progressive newspaper, declared that because of Moore’s column, the newspaper’s offices no longer constituted “a safe space” for transgender people.
Moore expected the newspaper editor to defend her, but there was not a peep out of her, and Moore resigned.
She then wrote an essay in which she accused The Guardian of “cowardice” and pointed out the irony that it stands as a bastion of tolerance and freedom of expression when what reigns within is a culture of fear. “A lot of people” wanted to come out and defend her, Moore said, but kept quiet for fear of losing their jobs.
If Moore had wanted not to lose hers, she had a solution. Like the dissenters in Stalin’s courts, she could have admitted her mistake and asked for forgiveness.
Submitting yourself to public humiliation and betraying your beliefs is the way out they offer to keep food on the table, or, in the case of Edinson Cavani, to keep his Ferrari.
The Uruguayan must have been very perplexed when he saw the reaction to the message he sent to his friend. He must have wondered, how is it possible that calling a person “black” is considered an insult in this country? But Cavani swallowed his pride and released a statement in which he said that it was never his intention to offend anyone and expressed “the sincerest apologies.”
Let’s see now whether the Football Association resists the pressure of the ayatollahs and risks not imposing a sanction. At the very least Cavani has managed to prevent United from firing him. And if he finds out about Moore, Hughes and others, he will have the comfort of knowing that in Puritan England there are equal opportunities for foreigners and natives. They accused him of being a racist and not just for speaking South American Spanish.
John Carlin writes regular columns for La Vanguardia (Spain) and Clarín, (Argentina). This column appeared in Clarín on 5 December 2020 and is translated by Kieran Tapsell. https://www.clarin.com/opinion/nuevos-puritanos-ingleses_0_WKBVA6XIw.html
John Carlin is a journalist, author and columnist for both English and Spanish language newspapers.
Comments
13 responses to “The New English Puritans”
One would suggest that the domain of the ‘new puritans’ is not a monopoly of the ‘left’ but much to do with old ‘puritans’ (or ‘pilgrims’?) of the right. In the US, political media and think tank agit prop, used to support the (‘owned’) GOP , is about creating or focusing upon divisive, but sociocultural non issues or noise?
“Negrito” certainly is a racist term. The author doesnt even explain its origin. It was first used by the Spanish in the Philippines. It meant “little black one or person” A term of such appalling racial superiority that it has been expunged from Filipino discourse. The word is vile and is derived from the Spanish genocide in the Philippines and South America. The author apparently cant distinguish between subjective intent and structural and linguistic racism. If Cavani thinks its a term of affection, in the Philippines he would be picking up a set of teeth. This word has a history in English football. Suarez another Uruguayan and a racist used the term against the then Manchester United captain Patrice Evra. Suarez used the same bogus defence that in Latin America it is a term of affection. Suarez got eight weeks. It is a term of racial superiority. Both Suarez and Cavani are white. There is no way that Cavani didnt know of the Suarez and Patrice Evra incident and the punishment handed out justifiably to Suarez. Evra the player that lodged the complaint (apparently a lefty political correctness warrior) is French and a former captain of the French national team and Manchester United. The team Cavani now plays for. And Cavani knew nothing of the controversy? The great Sir Alex Ferguson, then Evra’s coach was in no doubt that the term was racist. I suppose he is a shrinking violet lefty now also? There was a 115 page Report issued into the Suarez incident and subsequent penalty. This was in 2012. So much for the claim that political correctness is taking hold. Negrito is an impermissable term in FA competition by this precedent. Why is it the author ignores the Suarez precedent and the Report? The link is here.
file:///C:/Users/Paul/Downloads/fa-v-suarez-written-reasons-of-regulatory-commission.pdf
Thank you for that information. “Negrito” in the Philippines may well be an objectionable term, but in my experience, it certainly is not in Colombia, Argentina and Cuba, where I have heard it a number of times as a nickname between friends. Cavani did say, “Gracias, Negrito”, not “Thank you, Negrito.” A common term of affection in Argentina is “gordo”, which literally means “fat” or “gordito” “little fatty”, which, I suppose will have to be expunged from conversation between Spanish speakers once all copies of the 50 year old Australian comic, Fatty Finn, are burned and the 1980 film of the same name is never allowed to be publicly screened again.
The point is it is a racist term in the UK. The FA has already ruled in 2012 on the use of the term by Suarez. It is unbelievable that Cavani didnt know about the Suarez and Patricce Eva situation. The defense by Suarez that the term is “acceptable” in South America was rejected. For it be dredged up again doesnt wash. The FA issued guidelines ahead of this season clamping down on racist and discriminatory language and behaviour, with offences on social media carrying a minimum three-game ban. For Carlin to claim the ban represents a “puritanism of the left” is absurd. The English FA is a now a left wing organization apparently. As for across the Channel. The French national team captain Patrice Evra objected to the term in 2012. Cavani is a close friend of Suarez who is a racist. Cavani did it deliberately. Apparently Carlin has the ability to discern Cavani’s motives without speaking with him. A bit like his appalling apologa for Oscar Pistorias after a three hour interview. Cavani is playing off the subs bench. He will soon be back where he belongs. Out of the FA.
Don’t these twitter warriors have anything better to do?
Apparently not.
We are being saturated with guilt with all this political correctness. Someday soon, and I hope real soon, people will wake up to having their noses rubbed in outlandish, demonstrably false claims of moral superiority, claims that serve only to divide us, not to unite us.
Seemingly China doesn’t “do” guilt, or at least not in the way we in the west are conditioned to. Might that be one reason why they are powering on, while we wallow in our various puddles of misery?
Get a life, dude(s)!
More to do with ignorance than anything else. No need to think about anything, just blast away at Twitter. Must have learned this from Trump, Ignoramus In Chief.
Another example is the host of The Daily Show in the US saying the Chinese word for “um” should be banned:
TREVOR NOAH: If that word nei-ge is a word in Chinese, then, well, Chinese people just have to find another word.
I’m amazed to read this post on Pearls and Irritations. I only access the site to see what the far left are thinking, and certainly didn’t expect to find what I consider to be a conservative point-of-view. I like to read for example Cavan Hogue whose contempt for Australia is so highly apparent.
Having no truck with this linguistic silliness is not necessarily a conservative point of view, in the way opposition to gay marriage, abortion or euthanasia might be. If you do a search on Carlin’s other articles in P & I, you will find he is highly critical of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, which for some would place him in the “left” camp. Carlin seems to enjoy pricking pretension balloons which can be found anywhere on the left/centre/right spectrum.
Maybe Carlin could have mentioned that the word is impermissible by regulatory decision in FA football. Along with a raft of racist terms no doubt meant with affection from the terraces.
It is unworthy of PI because it is so poorly researched.
I think you misunderstand this website. For one, it is not particularly left wing, although our current far right wing politicians would probably think it is communist. And secondly, neither does it publish only articles of the progressive (left?) side of the political spectrum.
In my view it generally tries to provide viewpoints that try to correct much of the nonsense spouted by the Murdoch press and similar institutions such as the ASPI and peddled by the government and to present views from high caliber ex-public servants and from the academia providing expert opinions on matters of public interest or important matters not covered elsewhere.
In these times of much misinformation it is crucial to investigate multiple sources of information to get some certainty about what is actually the truth and what is not.
I think whyisitso is being ironic. I hope so. The Left lost sight of the reason for its existence, namely the fair distribution of income and wealth.